Exogenous enzymes, signaling peptides, and other classes of non-human proteins represent a potentially massive but largely untapped pool of biotherapeutic agents. From a practical perspective, however, the use of foreign proteins as novel...

A nocturnal activity pattern is central to almost all hypotheses on the adaptive origins of primates but this view has been challenged recently on the basis of variation in the cone opsin genes of nocturnal primates. The diversity among primates in...

Genetic and immunological tools have been used to study two protozoan parasites, Plasmodium falciparum and Toxoplasma gondii. Toxoplasma gondii provides an excellent model for the study of protozoan parasite biology. Plasmodium falciparum causes...

The Arabidopsis catalase gene family contains at least three genes, encoding subunits which combine in tetramers to form 7 detectable isozymes. Two of these genes are within 250 bp of each other at a single locus (CAT3/1) near the top of chromosome...

Vibrio cholerae is a water-borne, Gram negative enteropathogen that causes the gastrointestinal disorder, cholera, in humans. A critical step in cholera pathogenesis is the attachment and colonization of intestinal cells, and the formation of...

Transport vesicles form at a donor compartment and fuse to an acceptor compartment mediate the movement of cargo proteins within eukaryotic cells from one subcellular compartment to another. COPII vesicles specifically provide the means of...

CRISPR/Cas systems are a diverse family of small RNA pathways that are commonly described as a resistance mechanism to infection by lytic bacteriophage and invasion by conjugative plasmids. In the current work we demonstrate that CRISPR/Cas systems...

The unifying theme of this work has been the use of forward genetics to identify three new genes - each thought to play an important yet unrecognized role in either the core circadian oscillator of Neurospora crassa , or in its main physiological...

The localization of the putative adhesin LapA to the cell surface is a key regulatory step required by Pseudomonas fluorescens Pf0-1 to irreversibly attach to a surface and form a biofilm. LapA contains several domains conserved in predicted...

The potential of peptide mimics of V. cholerae lipopolysaccharide (LPS) to elicit cross-reactive immune responses against LPS was investigated, as an alternative approach towards the development of a cholera vaccine. Peptide mimics of two...

Prion diseases are progressive disorders that affect the central nervous system leading to memory loss, personality changes, ataxia and neurodegeneration. In humans, these disorders include Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, kuru and...

Proteins are ubiquitous in cells and are essential to a wide range of biological processes. Since existing proteins occupy only a small portion of the space of possible amino acid composition, understanding their sequence-structure-function...

To understand how the circadian clock can temporally organize a cell, the biochemical characterization of a clock protein, FRQ, was initiated in Neurospora crassa using immunochemical techniques. FRQ accumulated in constant light to maximum levels...

Bradyrhizobium japonicum forms a nitrogen-fixing symbiosis with soybean. Signaling events, such as production of flavonoids and Nod factor, initiate the interaction, leading to formation of specialized root organs called nodules. A B. japonicum...

Aneuploidy is frequently detected in human cancers and is implicated in carcinogenesis. Pharmacological targeting of aneuploidy is an attractive therapeutic strategy, as this would preferentially eliminate malignant over normal cells. Our prior...

Protein secretion is executed by the secretory pathway, which involves the delivery of membrane and soluble secretory proteins in vesicle intermediates that capture newly-synthesized proteins assembled in the endoplasmic reticulum (ER) and then...

The identification of molecular alterations present in cancer is critical to better understand carcinogenesis as well as the clinical trajectories of patients with malignant tumors. Early detection and application of appropriate treatment...

Interleukin-2 (IL-2) is an immunoregulatory cytokine whose biological effects are mediated through interaction with specific receptors (IL-2R) on the surface of target cells. Due to its presumed role in generating a normal immune response, IL-2 is...

The essential QSR1 gene in Saccharomyces cerevisiae is a member of a highly conserved family of genes found in eukaryotic and archaebacterial cells. QSR1 was discovered by its synthetic lethal relationship with QCR6, the nuclear encoded gene for...

Vibrio cholerae is a gram-negative bacterial pathogen that causes the severe diarrheal disease cholera. Several bacterial factors have been identified that are critical for V. cholerae intestinal colonization. The best characterized of these...

Since acyl Co-A: cholesterol acyltransferase (ACAT) is believed to be involved in important physiological functions such as lipoprotein assembly, cholesterol absorption, steroidogenesis, and pathogenesis of atherosclerosis, ACAT has been studied...

This thesis describes the synthetic study of two biologically related natural products: porphobilinogen (PBG) and cobyric acid. PBG is the key intermediate in the biosynthesis of all naturally occurring tetrapyrrolic 'pigments of life', including...

Type 4 prepilins and prepilin-like-proteins are secreted by a wide range of bacterial species and are required for a variety of functions including type 4 pilus (Tfp) formation, toxin and other enzyme secretion, gene transfer, and biofilm...

The frequency gene and the two proteins it encodes are central components of the Neurospora circadian clock. The frq message and proteins are involved in a negative feedback loop in which FRO represses its own transcript level. Based on this...

Acyl-coenzyme A: cholesterol acyltransferase (ACAT) plays important roles in cellular cholesterol homeostasis and in early stages of atherogenesis. ACAT has been investigated as a pharmaceutical target, yet its active site(s) remain largely...

Post-transcriptional pathways provide a major means of regulating eukaryotic gene expression. Reiterations of the AU-rich element (AURE) located within the 3' UTR of many labile cytokine and proto-oncogene mRNA serve as signals for rapid...

Circadian rhythms in a wide variety of cellular and metabolic processes are well documented in many organisms. An important step in understanding the molecular basis of the circadian clock is the characterization of clock-controlled genes. mRNA...

Retinitis Pigmentosa is an inherited retinal degenerative disorder, initiated by point mutations on the rhodopsin gene. This thesis set forth to understand the mechanism of this pathogenesis, as well as to further improve our understanding of...

A 62 kDa (p62) mitotic apparatus-associated protein has been shown to be important for the proper progression of mitosis in sea urchin embryos. The thesis project described here focuses on an immunological and a molecular characterization of p62....

The iodothyronine deiodinases, D1, D2, and D3, play a crucial role in determining the circulating and intracellular levels of active and inactive thyroid hormone (TH), and thus have a major effect on TH action during development and adulthood. The...